FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[95]The Ghost of Richard III, I, viii (1614).[96]InCal. State Papers (Dom.), under Sept. 2, 1611, I find "Description by Ralph Colphab [Thomas Cariat] of Brasenose College, Oxford, of a philosophical feast the guests at which were Chris Brook, John Donne," and others in exactly the order given below, save for one error. "In Latin Rhymes." Dr. A. Clark in his Aubrey'sBrief Lives, II, 50-51, gives the Latin verses from an old commonplace book in Lincoln College Library, "authore Rodolpho Calsabro, Aeneacense"; but prefers the attribution of another old copy, owned by Mr. Madan of Brasenose, "per Johannem Hoskyns, London." The translation by Reynolds, who died in 1614, is also given by Dr. Clark.

[95]The Ghost of Richard III, I, viii (1614).

[96]InCal. State Papers (Dom.), under Sept. 2, 1611, I find "Description by Ralph Colphab [Thomas Cariat] of Brasenose College, Oxford, of a philosophical feast the guests at which were Chris Brook, John Donne," and others in exactly the order given below, save for one error. "In Latin Rhymes." Dr. A. Clark in his Aubrey'sBrief Lives, II, 50-51, gives the Latin verses from an old commonplace book in Lincoln College Library, "authore Rodolpho Calsabro, Aeneacense"; but prefers the attribution of another old copy, owned by Mr. Madan of Brasenose, "per Johannem Hoskyns, London." The translation by Reynolds, who died in 1614, is also given by Dr. Clark.

BEAUMONT AND SIR PHILIP SIDNEY'S DAUGHTER; RELATIONS WITH OTHER PERSONS OF NOTE

Glimpses of the more personal relations of Beaumont with the world of rank and fashion, and to some extent of his character, are vouchsafed us in the few non-dramatic verses that may with certainty be ascribed to him. Unfortunately for our purpose, most of those included in thePoems, "by Francis Beaumont, Gent.," issued by Blaiklock in 1640 and printed again in 1653, and amongThe Golden Remains"of those so much admired Dramatick Poets, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gents.," in 1660, are, as I have already said, by other hands than his: some of them by his brother, Sir John, and by Donne, Jonson, Randolph, Shirley, and Waller. Of the juvenile amatory lyrics, addresses, and so-called sonnets in these collections, it is not likely that a single one is by him; for in an epistle to Sidney's daughter, the Countess of Rutland, written when he was evidently of mature years and reputation,—let us suppose, about 1611, Beaumont says:

I would avoid the common beaten waysTo women usèd, which are love or praise.As for the first, the little wit I haveIs not yet grown so near unto the graveBut that I can, by that dim fading light,Perceive of what or unto whom I write.

Let others, "well resolved to end their days With a loud laughter blown beyond the seas,"—let such

Write love to you: I would not willinglyBe pointed at in every company,As was that little tailor, who till deathWas hot in love with Queen Elizabeth.And for the last, in all my idle daysI never yet did living woman praiseIn prose or verse.

A sufficient disavowal, this, of the foolish love songs attributed to him by an uncritical posterity.

As for this "strange letter," as he denominates it, from which I have quoted, the sincere, as well as brusque, humour attests more than ordinary acquaintance with, and genuine admiration of, Elizabeth, the poetic and only child of Sir Philip Sidney. The Countess lived but twenty-five miles north-west of Charnwood, and in the same country of Leicestershire. One can see the towers from the heights above Grace-Dieu. The Beaumonts undoubtedly had been at Belvoir, time and again. "If I should sing your praises in my rhyme," says he to her of the "white soul" and "beautiful face,"

I lose my ink, my paper and my timeAnd nothing add to your o'erflowing store,And tell you nought, but what you knew before.Nor do the virtuous-minded (which I swear,Madam, I think you are) endure to hearTheir own perfections into question brought,But stop their ears at them; for, if I thoughtYou took a pride to have your virtues known,(Pardon me, madam) I should think them none.

Many a writer of the day agreed with Beaumont concerning Elizabeth Sidney,—"every word you speak is sweet and mild." She, said Jonson to Drummond of Hawthornden, "was nothing inferior to her father in poesie"; she encouraged it in others. But her husband, Roger, fifth Earl of Rutland, though a lover of plays himself, does not appear to have favoured his Countess's patronage of literary men. He burst in upon her, one day when Ben Jonson was dining with her, and "accused her that she kept table to poets." Of her excellence Jonson bears witness in four poems. Most pleasantly in that Epistle included in hisThe Forrest, where speaking of his tribute of verse, he says:

With you, I know my off'ring will find grace:For what a sinne 'gainst your great father's spirit,Were it to think, that you should not inheritHis love unto the Muses, when his skillAlmost you have, or may have, when you will?Wherein wise Nature you a dowrie gave,Worth an estate treble to that you have.Beauty, I know is good, and blood is more;Riches thought most: but, Madame, think what storeThe world hath scene, which all these had in trust,And now lye lost in their forgotten dust.

And in an Epigram[97]To the Honour'd —— Countesse of ——, evidently sent to her during the absence of her husband on the continent, he compliments her conduct,—

Not only shunning by your act, to doeOught that is ill, but the suspition too,—

at a time when others are following vices and false pleasures. But "you," he says,

admit no company but good,And when you want those friends, or neare in blood,Or your allies, you make your bookes your friends,And studie them unto the noblest ends,Searching for knowledge, and to keepe your mindThe same it was inspired, rich, and refin'd.

Among other admirers of the Countess of Rutland was Sir Thomas Overbury, who, according to Ben Jonson, was "in love with her." Beaumont would have known the brilliant and ill-starred Overbury, of Compton Scorpion, who was not only an intimate of Jonson's, but a devoted admirer of their mutual friend, Sir Henry Nevill of Billingbear.

And if Beaumont was on terms of affectionate familiarity with Sidney's daughter, he could not but have known Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, as well, the idol of William Browne's epitaph, and of his old friend Drayton's eulogy, on the "Fair Shepherdess,"

To whom all shepherds dedicate their lays,And on her altars offer up their bays.

"In her time Wilton house," says Aubrey, "was like a College; there were so many learned and ingeniose persons. She was the greatest patronesse of witt and learning of any lady in her time." And if Beaumont knew the mother, then, also, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, the son, to whom hismaster, Jonson, dedicates in 1611, the tragedy ofCatiline, prefaced, as we have already observed, by verses of Beaumont himself.

Whatever Rutland's objection may have been to his Countess's patronage of poets, we may be sure that that lady's attitude toward Beaumont and his literary friends was seconded by her husband's old friend the Earl of Southampton, with whom in earlier days Rutland used to pass away the time "in London merely in going to plaies every day." Southampton had remained a patron of Burbadge, Shakespeare, and the like. And when he died in 1624, we find not only Beaumont's acquaintance, Chapman, but Beaumont's brother, joining in the chorus of panegyric to his memory. "I keep that glory last which is the best," writes Sir John,

The love of learning which he oft express'dIn conversation, and respect to thoseWho had a name in arts, in verse, in prose.

Since Southampton was "a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves"[98]we may figure not only the two Beaumonts but their beloved Countess participating in such discussion of noble themes,—if not in London, then at Belvoir Castle or Titchfield House or Grace-Dieu Priory. If at Belvoir, Leland, the traveler, helps us to the scene. The castle, he says "standyth on the very knape of an highe hille, stepe up eche way, partely by nature, partely by working of mennes handes, as it may evidently be perceived. Of the late dayes [1540],the Erle of Rutland hath made it fairer than ever it was. It is straunge sighte to se be how many steppes of stone the way goith up from the village to the castel. In the castel be 2 faire gates, And its dungeon is a fair rounde tour now turnid to pleasure, as a place to walk yn, to se at the countery aboute, and raylid about the round [waull, and] a garden [plot] in the middle."[99]One sees Francis toiling up the "many steps," received by his Countess and the rest, and rejoicing with them in the view of the twenty odd family estates from the garden on the high tower.

Returning to Francis Beaumont's epistle to the Countess of Rutland, we observe that it concludes with a promise:

But, if your brave thoughts, which I must respectAbove your glorious titles, shall acceptThese harsh disorder'd lines, I shall ere longDress up your virtues new, in a new song;Yet far from all base praise and flattery,Although I know what'er my verses be,They will like the most servile flattery shew,If I write truth, and make the subject you.

The opportunity for "the new song" came in a manner unexpected, and, alas, too soon. In August 1612, but a brief month or so after she had been freed by her husband's death from the misery of an unhappy marriage, she was herself suddenly carried off by some mysterious malady. According to a letter of Chamberlain to Sir R. Winwood, "Sir Walter Raleighis slandered to have given her certaine Pills that despatch'd her." That, Sir Walter, even with the best intent in the world, could not have done in person, for he was in the Tower at the time. Perhaps the medicine referred to was one of those "excellent receipts" for which Raleigh and his half-brother, Adrian Gilbert, were famous. The chemist Gilbert was living in those days with the Countess of Rutland's aunt, at Wilton.

Three days after the death of the lady whom he so revered, Beaumont poured out his grief in verses justly praised as

A Monument that will then lasting beWhen all her Marble is more dust than she.

That is what John Earle, writing after Beaumont's own death, some four years later, says of theElegy on the Death of the Virtuous Lady, Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland. And so far as the elegy proper is concerned,—that is to say, the first half of the poem, ere it blazes into scathing indictment of the physicians who helped the Countess to her grave,—I fully agree with Earle. Here is poetry of the heart, pregnant with pathos, not only of the untimely event—she was but twenty-seven years old,—but of the unmerited misfortune that had darkened the brief chapter of her existence: her father's death while she was yet in infancy,—

Ere thou knewest the use of tearsSorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years;

sorrow in her wedded life,—

As soon as thou couldst apprehend a grief,There were enough to meet thee; and the chiefBlessing of women, marriage, was to theeNought but a sacrament of misery.

And then,

Why didst thou die so soon? Oh, pardon me!I know it was the longest life to thee,That e'er with modesty was call'd a span,Since the Almighty left to strive with man.

In this threnody of wasted loveliness and innocence, we have our most definite revelation of Beaumont's personality as a man among men: his tenderness, his fervid friendship, his passionate reverence for spotless womanhood and the sacrament of holy marriage (Jonson has given us the facts about her loathsome husband); his admiration of the chivalric great—as of the hero whose life was ventured and generously lost at Zutphen "to save a land," his contempt for pedantic stupidity and professional ineptitude, his faith in the "everlasting" worth of poetic ideals, his realization of the vanity of human wishes and of the counter-balancing dignity, the cleasing poignancy, of human sorrow; his reluctant but profound submission to the decree of "the wise God of Nature"; his acceptance of the inexplicable irony of life and of the crowning mercy:

I will not hurt the peace which she should haveBy looking longer in her quiet grave,—

the consummation that all his heroines of torturedchastity, the Bellarios, Arethusas, Aspasias, Pantheas, Uranias, of his mimic world, devoutly desired. And as a revelation of his poetic temper, perhaps all the more for its accessory bitterness and rhetorical conceits, this elegy is as valuable a piece of documentary evidence as exists outside of Beaumont's dramatic productions. It displays not a few of the characteristics which distinguish him as a dramatist from Fletcher: his preference in the best of their joint-plays for serious poetic theme, his realist humour and bold satiric force, his quiverful of words and rhythmical sequence, his creative imagery, his lines of vivid, final spontaneity,—

Sorrow can make a verse without a Muse;

and "Thou art gone,"—

Gone like the day thou diedst upon, and weMay call that back again as soon as thee.

In still another way the lines on the death of Sidney's daughter are instructive. Its noble tribute to Sidney'sArcadiais payment of a debt manifest in more than one of the dramas to which Beaumont had contributed. Of Sir Philip, Beaumont here writes:

He left two children, who for virtue, wit,Beauty, were lov'd of all,—thee and his writ:Two was too few; yet death hath from us tookThee, a more faultless issue than his book,Which, now the only living thing we haveFrom him, we'll see, shall never find a graveAs thou hast done. Alas, would it might beThat books their sexes had, as well as we,That we might see this married to the worth,And many poems like itself bring forth.

TheArcadiahad already brought forth offspring: in prose, Greene'sMenaphonandPandosto, and Lodge'sRosalynde; in verse, Day'sIle of Guls. It had fathered, immediately, the subplot of Shakespeare'sKing Lear,—and, indirectly, portions of theWinter's Tale, andAs You Like It, and of other Elizabethan plays.[100]Within the twelve months immediately preceding August 1612, it had inspired also, as we have already observed, Beaumont and Fletcher'sCupid's Revenge, the finest scenes in which are Beaumont's dramatic adaptation of romantic characters and motives furnished by Sir Philip. And from that same "faultless issue," theArcadia, virtue, art, and beauty, loved of all, had earlier still been drawn by Beaumont, certainly forThe Maides Tragedy, and, perhaps, forPhilasteras well.

The acquaintance with the Rutland family was continued after the death of Francis by his brother John, and his sister Elizabeth. The Nymph "of beauty most divine ... whose admirèd vertues draw All harts to love her" in John's poem,The Shepherdess, is Lady Katharine Manners, daughter of Francis, sixth Earl of Rutland, and now the wife of George Villiers, Marquis of Buckingham; and the Shepherdess herself "who long had kept her flocks On stony Charnwood's dry and barren rocks," the country dame "For singing crowned, whence grew a world of fame Among the sheep cotes," is Elizabeth Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, back on a visit from her Seyliard homein Kent. She had wandered into the summer place of the Rutlands and Buckinghams near the Grace-Dieu priory—"watered with our silver brookes," and had been welcomed and had sung for them. And now John repays the courtesy with indirect and graceful compliment.

With the Villiers family, as I have earlier intimated, the Beaumonts were connected not only by acquaintance as county gentry but by ties of blood. Sir George Villiers, a Leicestershire squire, had married for his second wife, about 1589, Maria Beaumont, a relative of theirs, who had been brought up by their kinsmen of Coleorton Hall to the west of them on the other side of the ridge. It will be remembered that one of those Coleorton Beaumonts, Henry, was an executor of Judge Beaumont's will in 1598. The father of the Maria, or Mary, Beaumont whom Henry Beaumont nurtured as a waiting gentlewoman in his household, was his second cousin, Anthony Beaumont of Glenfield in Leicestershire. While Maria was living at the Hall, the old Knight, Sir George Villiers of Brooksby, recently widowed, visited his kinswoman, Eleanor Lewis, Henry's wife, at Coleorton, "found there," writes a contemporary, Arthur Wilson, "this young gentlewoman, allied, and yet a servant of the family," was fascinated by her graces and made her Lady Villiers. This Sir George Villiers was of an old and distinguished family. Leland mentions it first among the ten families of Leicestershire, "that be there most of reputation."[101]And he says "The chiefest house of the Villars at this time is at Brokesby in Leicestershire,lower by four miles than Melton, on the higher ripe [bank] of Wreke river. There lie buried in the church divers of the Villars. This Villars [of 1540] is lord of Hoby hard-by, and of Coneham in Lincolnshire.... He is a man of but two hundred marks of land by the year." This "Villars" was the father of the Sir George who married Maria Beaumont. Brooksby, near Melton Mowbray, is only two or three hours' drive from Coleorton.

GEORGE VILLIERS, FIRST DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM, AND FAMILY From the painting by Honthorst in the National Portrait GalleryGEORGE VILLIERS, FIRST DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM, AND FAMILYFrom the painting by Honthorst in the National Portrait Gallery

The children of this marriage, John, George, and Christopher, were but a few years younger than the young Beaumonts of Grace-Dieu; and there would naturally be some coming and going between the Villiers children of Brooksby and their Beaumont kin of Coleorton and Grace-Dieu. George, the second son, born in 1592, through whom the fortunes of the family were achieved, was introduced to King James in August 1614. This youth of twenty-two had all the graces of the Beaumont as well as the Villiers blood. "He was of singularly prepossessing appearance," says Gardiner, "and was endowed not only with personal vigour, but with that readiness of speech which James delighted in." It was his mother, Maria, now the widowed Lady Villiers, who manœuvred the meeting. Her husband's estates had gone to the children of the first marriage: George was her favourite son and she staked everything upon his success. James took to him from the first; the same year he made him cup-bearer; the next, Gentleman of the Bed-chamber, and knighted him and gave him a pension. We may imagine that Francis Beaumont and his brother John watched the promotion of their kinsman with keeninterest. But his phenomenal career was only then beginning. In 1616, a few months after Francis had died, Sir George Villiers was elevated to the peerage as Viscount Villiers. By 1617 this devoted "Steenie" of his "dear Dad and Gossop," King James, is Earl of Buckingham, and now,—that Somerset has fallen,—the most potent force in the kingdom; in 1618 he is Marquis, and in 1623, Duke,—and for some years past he has been enjoying an income of £15,000 a year from the lands and perquisites bestowed upon him. Meanwhile his brother, John, has, in 1617, married a great heiress, the daughter of Sir Edward Coke of Beaumont's Inner Temple, and in 1619 has become Viscount Purbeck; his mother, the intriguing Maria, has been created Countess of Buckingham, in her own right; in due time his younger brother, the stupid Christopher, is made Earl of Anglesey. And Buckingham takes thought not for his immediate family alone: In 1617 "Villiers' kinsman [Hen] Beaumont was to have the Bishopric of Worcester, but failed";[102]in 1622 his cousin, Sir Thomas Beaumont of Coleorton, the son of the Sir Henry[103]who cared for Villiers' mother in her indigence, is created Viscount Beaumont of Swords; and in 1626, John Beaumont of Grace-Dieu is dubbed knight-baronet.

In 1620, the Marquis of Buckingham had married Katharine Manners, the daughter and sole heiress of Francis, Earl of Rutland. It was a love match; andJohn Beaumont celebrated it with a glowing epithalamium, praying for the speedy birth of a son

Who may be worthy of his father's stile,May answere to our hopes, and strictly may combineThe happy height of Villiers race with noble Rutland's line.

Soon afterwards and before 1623, John Beaumont'sShepherdesse, spoken of above, was written. Beside the Nymph, the Marchioness of Buckingham, those whom the poem describes as living in "our dales,"—and welcoming Elizabeth Beaumont,—are the father of the Marchioness, the Earl of Rutland, "his lady," Cicely (Tufton), the stepmother of Katharine Manners,—and

Another lady, in whose brestTrue wisdom hath with bounty equal place,As modesty with beauty in her face:She found me singing Flora's native dowresAnd made me sing before the heavenly pow'rs,For which great favour, till my voice be done,I sing of her, and her thrice noble son.

This other lady, so wise, and bounteous to John Beaumont, is the Countess of Buckingham, who when John and our Francis were boys, was poor cousin Maria of the Coleorton Beaumonts. To the Marquis of Buckingham, "her thrice-noble sonne," John writes many poetic addresses in later years: of the birth of a daughter, Mall, "this sweete armefull"; of the birth and death of his first son; of how in his "greatnesse," George Villiers did not forget him:

You, onely you, have pow'r to make me dwellIn sight of men, drawne from my silent cell;

and of how Villiers had won him the recognition of the King:

Your favour first th' anointed head inclinesTo heare my rurall songs, and read my lines.

George Villiers, is "his patron and his friend." In writing to the great Marquis and Duke, John Beaumont never recalls the kinship; but in writing to the less distinguished brother, the Viscount Purbeck, he delicately alludes to it.

In the fortunes of the Vauxes of Harrowden, the Beaumonts would naturally have continued their interest. Anne, imprisoned after the Gunpowder Plot, was released at the end of six months. The family persisted in its adherence to the Catholic faith and politics. As late as Feb. 26, 1612, "Mrs. Vaux, Lord (Edward) Vaux's mother, is condemned to perpetual imprisonment, for refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance"; and we observe that on March 21, of the same year, "Lord Vaux is committed to the Fleet" for a like refusal.[104]Young Lord Vaux got out of the Fleet, in time married, and lived till 1661.

Others of kin or family connection,—and of his own age,—with whom Francis would be on terms of social intercourse or even intimacy during his prime, were his cousin, Robert Pierrepoint, who by 1601 was in Parliament as member for Nottingham, and in 1615 was High Sheriff of the shire; Henry Hastings, bornin 1586, who since 1604 had been fifth Earl of Huntingdon, and in May 1616 was to be of those appointed for the trial of the Earl and Countess of Somerset; Huntingdon's sister, Catherine (who was wife of Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield), and his brother, Edward, a captain in the navy, who the year after Beaumont's death made the voyage to Guiana under Sir Walter Raleigh; Huntingdon's cousin, and also Beaumont's kinsman, Sir Henry Hastings, of whom we have already heard as one of Father Gerard's converts (a first cousin of Mrs. Elizabeth Vaux, and husband of an Elizabeth Beaumont of Coleorton); Sir William Cavendish, of the Pierrepoint connection, a pupil of Hobbes, an intimate friend of James I, and a leader in the society of Court, who was knighted in 1609, and in 1612 strengthened his position greatly by marrying Christiana, daughter of Lord Bruce of Kinloss; and that other young Cavendish, Sir William of Welbeck, county Notts., who in 1611 was on his travels on the continent under the care of Sir Henry Wotton. With at least three of these scions of families allied to the Beaumonts, Francis had been associated, as I have already pointed out, by contemporaneity at the Inns of Court.

Neither the epistle to Elizabeth Sidney nor the elegy on her death was included by Blaiklock in his foolish book of so-called Beaumont poems. From the elegy on Lady Markham's death, in 1609, there included, we learn little of the poet's self—he had never seen the lady's face, and is merely rhetoricizing. From the elegy, also included by Blaiklock, "On the Death of the Lady Penelope Clifton," on October 26, 1613, almostas artificial, we learn no more of Beaumont's personality,—but we are led to conjecture some social acquaintance with the distinguished family of her father, Lord Rich, afterwards Earl of Warwick, and of her husband, Sir Gervase Clifton, who had been specially admitted to the Inner Temple in 1607; and the conjecture is confirmed by the perusal of lines "to the immortal memory of this fairest and most vertuous lady" included in the works of Sir John Beaumont. He writes as knowing Lady Penelope intimately,—the sound of her voice, the fairness of her face, her high perfections,—and as regretting that he had neglected to utter his affection in verse "while she had lived":

We let our friends pass idly like our timeTill they be gone, and then we see our crime.

These poems on Lady Penelope Clifton forge still another link between the Beaumonts and the Sidneys, for Penelope's mother, the Lady Penelope Devereux, daughter of Walter, first Earl of Essex, was Sidney'sinnamorata, the Stella to his Astrophel.

One may with safety extend the list of Beaumont's acquaintances among the gentry and nobility by crediting him with some of Fletcher's during the years in which the poets were living in close association; not only with Fletcher's family connections, the Bakers, Lennards, and Sackvilles of Kent, but with those to whom Fletcher dedicates, about 1609, the first quarto of hisFaithfull Shepheardesse: Sir William Skipwith, for instance, Sir Walter Aston, and Sir Robert Townshend. Of these the first, esteemed for his "witty conceits," his "epigrams and poesies," wasadmired and loved not only by Fletcher but by Beaumont's brother as well—to whom we owe an encomium evidently sincere:

... A comely body, and a beauteous mind;A heart to love, a hand to give inclin'd;A house as free and open as the ayre;A tongue which joyes in language sweet and faire, ...

and more of the kind. Sir William was a not distant neighbour of the Beaumonts, and was knighted, as we have seen, at the same time and place as Henry of Grace-Dieu; one may reasonably infer that his "house as free and open as the ayre" at Cotes in Leicestershire harboured Fletcher and the two Beaumonts on more than one occasion. Sir Walter Aston of Tixall in Staffordshire, the diplomat, of the Inner Temple since 1600, had been, since 1603,[105]the patron also of Francis Beaumont's life-long friend, Drayton. And that poet keeps up the intimacy for many years. Writing, after 1627 when Sir Walter, now Baron Aston of Forfar, was sent on embassy to Spain, he says of Lady Aston that "till here again I may her see, It will be winter all the year with me". In 1609 Sir Walter is a "true lover of learning," in whom "as in a centre" Fletcher "takes rest," and whose "goodness to the Muses" is "able to make a work heroical." Of Sir Robert Townshend's relation to our dramatists we know nothing save that Fletcher says: "You love above my means to thank ye." He came of a family that is still illustrious, and for a quarter of a century he sat in Parliament.

Fletcher's closest friend, if we except Beaumont, seems to have been Charles Cotton of Beresford, Staffordshire, "a man of considerable fortune and high accomplishments," the son of Sir George Cotton of Hampshire. He owed his estates in Staffordshire, and in Derbyshire as well, to his marriage with the daughter of Sir John Stanhope. To him in 1639, as "the noble honourer of the dead author's works and memory," Richard Brome dedicates the quarto of Fletcher'sMonsieur Thomas. "Yours," he says, "is the worthy opinion you have of the author and his poems; neither can it easily be determined, whether your affection to them hath made you, by observing, more able to judge of them, than your ability to judge of them hath made you to affect them deservedly, not partially.... Your noble self (has) built him a more honourable monument in that fair opinion you have of him than any inscription subject to the wearing of time can be." To this Charles Cotton, his cousin, Sir Aston Cockayne, writes a letter in verse after the appearance of the first folio of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, 1647, speaking of Fletcher as "your friend and old companion" and reproaching him for not having taken the pains to set the printers right about what in that folio was Fletcher's, what Beaumont's, what Massinger's,—"I wish as free you had told the printers this as you did me." And it is apparently to Cotton that Cockayne is alluding when, upbraiding the publishers for not giving each of the authors his due, he says, "But how came I (you ask) so much to know? Fletcher's chief bosome-friend informed me so." Elsewhere Cockayne describesFletcher and Massinger as "great friends"; but the "bosome-friend" mentioned above cannot be Massinger, for Massinger is one of those concerning whose authorship "the bosome-friend" gives information.

Cotton was a friend of Ben Jonson, Donne, and Selden, also. To him it is, as a critic, and not to his son, who was a poet, that Robert Herrick, born seven years after Beaumont, writes:

For brave comportment, wit without offence,Words fully flowing, yet of influence,Thou art that man of men, the man alone,Worthy the publique admiration:Who with thine owne eyes read'st what we doe write,And giv'st our numbers euphonie and weight;Tell'st when a verse springs high, how understoodTo be, or not, borne of the royall-blood.What state above, what symmetrie below,Lives have, or sho'd have, thou the best can show.—[106]

And it is likely that Cotton did the same for Fletcher and Beaumont.

Of Cotton, Fletcher's and, therefore, Beaumont's friend, Lord Clarendon gives us explicit information: "He had all those qualities which in youth raise men to the reputation of being fine gentlemen: such a pleasantness and gaiety of humour, such a sweetness and gentleness of nature, and such a civility and delightfulness in conversation, that no man in the Court or out of it appeared a more accomplished person; all these extraordinary qualifications being supported byas extraordinary a clearness of courage, and fearlessness of spirit, of which he gave too often manifestation." In later life he was less happy in fortune and in disposition, "and gave his best friends cause to have wished that he had not lived so long." He passed through the Civil War and died at the end of Cromwell's protectorate, 1658.

And of Robert Herrick, we may say that he, too, was surely an acquaintance of our poets. He writes many poems to Ben Jonson. To their other friend, Selden, Fletcher's connection by the Baker alliance, and Beaumont's associate in the Inner Temple, he writes appreciatively:

Whose smile can make a poet, and your glanceDash all bad poems out of countenance.[107]

And of our dramatists themselves, he writes about the same time that he is writing to Selden, in his versesTo the Apparition of his Mistresse, calling him to Elizium,—

Amongst which glories, crown'd with sacred bayesAnd flatt'ring ivie, two recite their plaies—Beaumont and Fletcher, swans to whom all earesListen while they, like syrens in their spheres,Sing their Evadne.[108]

JOHN SELDEN From the painting in the National Portrait Gallery, LondonJOHN SELDENFrom the painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London

The Bohemian life on the Bankside, such as it was, must have been brought to an end by Beaumont's marriage, about 1613. By that time Beaumont had writtenThe Woman-Hater,The Knight of the Burning Pestle,The Maske, and several poems; Fletcher,The Faithfull Shepheardesseand three or four plays more; the two in partnership, at least five plays; and Fletcher had meanwhile collaborated with other dramatists in from eight to eleven plays which do not now concern us. As to the remaining dramas assigned to this period and attributed by various critics to Beaumont and Fletcher in joint-authorship, we shall later inquire. Suffice it for the present to say that I do not believe that the former had a hand in any of them, exceptThe Scornful Ladie.

FOOTNOTES:[97]Underwoods, XLVIII.[98]Thomas Nashe,Dedication of The Life of Jack Wilton.[99]Itinerary, Ed. L. T. Smith, Vol. I, 97.[100]See Greg'sPastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Drama, and my former pupil, H. W. Hill's,Sidney's Arcadia and the Elizabethan Drama.[101]Itinerary, Vol. I, 21. See also, below, Appendix, Table A.[102]Cal. State Papers, Domestic, Chamberlain to Carleton, Jan. 4, 1617. The Villiers descent is given in Collins,Peerage, III, 762.[103]Sir Henry had petitioned ineffectually for the revival of the viscounty at an earlier date.Cal. St. Pa., Dom., Nov. 23, 1606; see, also, reference in 1614. See also, below, Appendix, Table A.[104]Calendar of State Papers(Domestic), 1611-1617, under dates.[105]Elton,Drayton, p. 28.[106]Hesperides, Aldine edition ofHerrick, II, 136.[107]Hesperides, Aldine edition,Herrick, I, 301.[108]Op. cit., I, 329.

[97]Underwoods, XLVIII.

[98]Thomas Nashe,Dedication of The Life of Jack Wilton.

[99]Itinerary, Ed. L. T. Smith, Vol. I, 97.

[100]See Greg'sPastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Drama, and my former pupil, H. W. Hill's,Sidney's Arcadia and the Elizabethan Drama.

[101]Itinerary, Vol. I, 21. See also, below, Appendix, Table A.

[102]Cal. State Papers, Domestic, Chamberlain to Carleton, Jan. 4, 1617. The Villiers descent is given in Collins,Peerage, III, 762.

[103]Sir Henry had petitioned ineffectually for the revival of the viscounty at an earlier date.Cal. St. Pa., Dom., Nov. 23, 1606; see, also, reference in 1614. See also, below, Appendix, Table A.

[104]Calendar of State Papers(Domestic), 1611-1617, under dates.

[105]Elton,Drayton, p. 28.

[106]Hesperides, Aldine edition ofHerrick, II, 136.

[107]Hesperides, Aldine edition,Herrick, I, 301.

[108]Op. cit., I, 329.

BEAUMONT'S MARRIAGE AND DEATH; THE SURVIVING FAMILY

In the 1653 edition of the "Poems; By Francis Beaumont, Gent." there is one, ordinarily regarded as of doubtful authorship, which, in default of information to the contrary, I am tempted to accept as his and to attach to it importance, as of biographical interest. It purports to bear his signature "Fran. Beaumont"; it bears for me the impress of his literary style. Writing before August 1612, to the Countess of Rutland, Beaumont had, as we have remarked, disclaimed ever having praised "living woman in prose or verse." InThe Examination of his Mistris' Perfections, the poem of which I speak, the writer praises with all sincerity the woman of his love:

Stand still, my happinesse; and, swelling heart,—No more! till I consider what thou art.

Like our first parents in Paradise who "thought it nothing if not understood," so the poet of his happiness—

Though by thy bountious favour I be inA paradice, where I may freely tasteOf all the vertuous pleasures which thou hast[I] wanting that knowledge, must, in all my blisse,Erre with my parents, and aske what it is.My faith saith 'tis not Heaven; and I dare swear,If it be Hell, no pain of sence, is there;Sure, 't is some pleasant place, where I may stay,As I to Heaven go in the middle way.Wert thou but faire, and no whit vertuous,Thou wert no more to me but a faire houseHanted with spirits, from which men do them blesse,And no man will halfe furnishe to possesse:Or, hadst thou worth wrapt in a rivell'd skin,'T were inaccessible. Who durst go inTo find it out? for sooner would I goTo find a pearle cover'd with hills of snow;'T were buried vertue, and thou mightst me moveTo reverence the tombe, but not to love,—No more than dotingly to cast mine eyeUpon the urne where Lucrece' ashes lye.But thou art faire and sweet, and every goodThat ever yet durst mixe with flesh and blood:The Devill ne're saw in his fallen stateAn object whereupon to ground his hateSo fit as thee; all living things but heLove thee; how happy, then, must that man beWhom from amongst all creatures thou dost take!Is there a hope beyond it? can he makeA wish to change thee for? This is my blisse,Let it run on now; I know what it is.

The poet of this tribute is not wooing, but worshiping the woman won; reverently striving to comprehend an ineffable joy. The poem is not of praises such as Beaumont in his epistleAd Comitissam Rutlundiaecontemns, praises "bestow'd at most need on a thirsty soul." The writer, here, purports to examineinto his Mistress's perfections, but, like the author of the epistle to the Countess, he examines not at all,—he observes the reticence for which Beaumont there had given the reason,—

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